For the Birds

I remember when I first noticed, of course. But I don't remember when I first should have noticed. And nothing will drive you crazy like going back over your memories from when you weren't paying attention, trying to parse the half-discarded fragments of imagery that are rolling around in your head. Did I see more splashes of red and feathers than usual along the shoulders of the road in the days and weeks beforehand? Or am I thinking of rats and squirrels, the normal churn of the urban ecosystem? Or am I shuffling things around in my mind, taking every vague impression of roadkill I encountered the past couple years and sliding it forward, so it seems like some ominous, foreshadowy week?

Did I see four or five young teens circled around, eyes downcast, examining the death throes of a flapping, screeching animal, with WTF plastered all over their faces? Or had they just been holding that solemn council over a phone, hooting and hollering at some Instagram thot's latest stunt?

You try to tell the story, even though you know you can't, because your mind has already thrown out all the information. You're a detective going back to the scene, counting on the security cameras, but the tapes have been wiped and the evidence is gone no matter how badly you want it. It's tempting to try anyway, to mine what's left for some trace details, but it's a waste of time. That's cloud reading. That's a Rorschach test. Anything I told you from then would be more invention than fact.

But I can tell you when I think I first noticed. It was still before the world had noticed, before any vague mumblings at the bar or trending topics online or press conferences from the mayor's office. And there's nothing vague or ambiguous about it. I remember it perfectly, because it literally slammed into me out of nowhere.

I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, my normal route to anywhere. I can't remember where I was headed exactly, but it was nowhere special, just out to get groceries or grab a drink or do a little reading in the park. And it was just by the Nostrand stop, which I remember for no better reason than that I remember catching the Dunkin' Donuts out of the corner of my eye, and when it happened I was thinking of how long it had been since I'd been there, how long it had been since I'd had any kind of fast food at all, and for a brief moment I was distracted, not looking ahead, but looking at a fucking donut shop and thinking of the wild, nutritionally suspect days of my early twenties.

And it was then that my handlebars shuddered in my hands, and I thought for a moment I must have hit some new-formed, unmapped pothole. But the back wheel rode steady, and a puff of feathers emerged like confetti at the bottom edge of my vision, and as I slowed to a stop I looked back to see the bloody wreckage of some hapless pigeon.

It was lucky timing, odd as that may sound. Some other millisecond's variance in our collision and the damn thing's whole body might have gotten lodged in my front wheel, locking it up and sending me over my handlebars. But instead, it managed to time its impact just so, sticking its neck in between the spokes and the fork so that my bike functioned like some wild, spinning guillotine. The thing lay headless there on the edge of the path, blood spattered on the sidewalk and on the cuffs of my jeans.

That I remember, because that doesn't happen every day. And maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was just a freak accident, as no doubt happens all the time in a world as large and chaotic as this one. Even if that's so, it still served a purpose. It primed me, it kept broken wings and snapped, hollow bones at the forefront of my mind. And so a week later, when I heard about a dead pigeon again, that too received a little asterisk, a little bookmark in my mind's unconscious filing system, so that I remembered that too.

"The driver nearly shit his pants," Eric said, two rounds in and a bit animated. "And it stuck right on the windshield, like one of those little Garfield stuffed animals. He had to pull over to clean it off so he could see."

"I mean, they fly into building windows all the time, right?" That was Jen—a bit grossed out, but not enough to kill her curiosity.

"Jen, you've been in a car before. How often are your Ubers getting pelted by fucking birds? The thing chipped the windshield where it hit. You'd think it was trying to kill us or something."

"That's weird."

It was weird. I sipped my drink, and I thought about telling my story. It was the obvious thing to do. But I didn't, and I'm not sure exactly why not. It was one of those decisions you make consciously, but without any good reason. Partly it was that I was a little tired—I'd gone out against my better judgment—and my two drinks hadn't energized me like Eric's but had left me lagging and passive. I couldn't summon the energy to speak over the background conversation and music, to choreograph all the beats and dramatic movements and carefully calibrated hyperbole that constitute a well told story.

But also, I think, I didn't want to make that leap. Eric's story was weird. My story was weird. But our stories together were something else: a third story. Just a coincidence, logically. Just a bit of weird one-upmanship, perfect for the bar. But I couldn't go there without going one step further: the implied connection, the premature pattern. It sounded silly and conspiratorial. And, of course, I never would have suggested it aloud. I would have walked back the implication, laughed out "What a freaky coincidence, right?" I would have been lying, though. Inside, I had an illogical feeling I couldn't shake, and it bothered me that much more because I'm usually really careful not to get out over my skis with rumors and chatter. But I couldn't help it. "That's no coincidence." That's what I was thinking but didn't say.

It was only a couple days before the next one. A Tinder date, crying as she walked into the bar, shaken because somehow she had just backed over a bird while trying to park.

"I didn't seem him!" she pleaded. "I was going so slow. Why didn't he move out of the way?"

The date was over then, not just because she was upset, but because instead of trying to comfort her or move on from the incident, I dwelt on it. I became a macabre detective, and she was my hapless witness. Her comfort didn’t matter. I wanted to crack the case.

This pigeon, did it try to get out of the way? Or was it just the opposite: did it head to the wheel? Had she heard about any other accidents with pigeons? From friends? On Twitter? Was this a thing?

By the end, I can only imagine what she must have thought of me, this lanky, crass autist, more fascinated with avian death than the woman he was presumably on a date with. Perhaps, later, she would think back and realize I was onto something. At the time, I'm sure I seemed crazy. Hell, that's how I seemed to myself.

I guess I should have leaned into it. Not that would have changed anything, but if I had started making noise then, maybe I could have captured a little clout, a little credit for prescience. Alas, I kept my worries to myself.

It all happened very quickly after that. Couldn’t have been a week later that I ran into my neighbor and her kid, standing beside her car. There beneath the bumper was a little pool of the assholes, strutting around in the way. She didn’t speak English and my Spanish is garbage, but we’ve always made do with a little game of charades. And through a combination of body language and flailing gestures, she gave me the gist. She’d been there some time, exasperated, shooing them as aggressively as she felt comfortable with, which wasn’t all that aggressive. She was one of those people grossed out by birds, very much of the rats-with-wings school.

I strode over and started shoving them aside, first pushing them with my foot and then reaching down to sweep them with my arms, even as she cringed. It was no use. No sooner did I pull my arm away than they rushed back in to fill the space. It was like trying to wipe away a deep puddle. Two or three dozen of them, absolutely determined to stay right where they were. Eventually, I gave up as well.

I reported my failure with a dejected shrug. She kept staring at her car, and searched my limited vocabulary for words, but I couldn’t conjure up the right ones, so I returned to mime. I pointed at the pigeons, gripped an imaginary steering wheel, and laid my foot down on the gas.

She looked at me with horror and shook her head before grabbing the kid’s arm and trudging off to the bus. God only knew how much it would extend her commute.

It was only another couple days before it was officially news. Even if most people hadn’t run into it, they knew someone who had, or they had seen a whole clip compilation on YouTube or TikTok, enough to feel confident it wasn’t all some viral marketing campaign. And it was getting worse.

A week later, and that bus my neighbor had retreated to offered no reprieve. They sat idling at bus stops, waiting patiently for those uncooperative avian obstacles to move. Or else, they didn’t. Some percentage of bus drivers were true blue New Yorkers, working class and unwilling to defer their God-given right of way to the pigeons. That lasted a day or two before the optics won out. Even if you didn’t watch the videos, the buses would progress on their routes from the outer boroughs—where the problem, for some reason, had begun in earnest—to tony neighborhoods in Park Slope or the Village or Chelsea with wheel wells caked in blood and feathers. It wasn’t 48 hours before the mayor conducted a press conference, flanked by representatives from the ASPCA and PETA, announcing that the MTA had been given orders not to engage in such slaughter just in the interest of shaving a few minutes off a bus route.

There was a brief few weeks when my bike served as a kind of superpower. I won't pretend I didn't commit the cardinal sin of urban cyclists everywhere: smug superiority. I would glide by hapless commuters idling beside parked cars or bunching up around hopelessly beached buses, content in my superior mode of transport.

And I relished the chaos. There was a novelty then, a bit of joy in the disruption of normal society. It was like a big, extended snow day. I’m sure an economist could tell you that weather disruptions are a huge economic disaster: X billions of dollars in lost productivity, or whatever. But any red-blooded American child will tell you they’re a special kind of treat worth virtually any cost.

The joy of a snow day is contingent on its transience, however. You know that the plows will be mobilized and the roads will be cleared. The weather upends your routine, not your life. It is a safe and fluffy apocalypse.

I don't think I was deluded for expecting as much out of this weirdness. I certainly wasn't alone. A temperamental divide surely existed between those who chafed and grated at the disruption and those who made a vacation out of it—all selfies and posts and lazy puns overlaid onto their Instagram stories. “New York is for the birds.” That kind of shit.

It hit us all slowly. It was a hell of a thing to see, compared to the speed with which my peers could mobilize around the latest online outrage. Some musician they've never even listened to liked the wrong tweet! Some teacher in Kentucky wouldn't acknowledge their students glee/gler pronouns! Even sensible shit: the Chinese disappeared a dissident, Putin started conscripting puppies. Shit that's a thousand miles away is the most important thing in the world.

But the thing all around you, the thing staring you in the face every time you walk out your front door. It's fine! No matter that half the transit system is shut down. People can work from home, right?

“Hmm. Some of the grocery shelves are looking a little thin. I guess the drivers couldn't deliver by Zoom. Oh well. It'll be fine. There's always plenty of food.”

Some of my neighbors got clued in a little quicker than others, to be sure. You notice the absent groceries when you're in the store in the first place. That little "Unavailable" icon on Doordash just doesn't have the same impact.

For my part, I stocked up pretty early. Bags and bags of rice and beans. Simple, cheap, and lasting, overflowing from my closets onto my furniture. Bags of rice on either end of my couch like throw pillows. One can only be so much of a prepper in an NYC apartment, though. I was good for weeks, not months. The few friends I trusted enough to tell, they all said I was crazy. No way this would go on for months. I was being paranoid.

Well, I don't need to tell you now. It was the best $300 I ever spent.

There was still a lot of pearl-clutching coming from my friends by the time the mayor came around. Some scolding Op-Eds by vegans in the Times, Brian Lehrer interviewing a professor about "ornithological violence," which, it turns out, is a manifestation of white supremacy. Who'd have guessed?

But apparently, between the cop unions, the MTA, the grumblings of various outer-borough constituencies, he'd realized the jig was up. I heard somewhere it was the hospitals that really did it. Too many people dying in idling ambulances, crawling along as some poor EMT walked ahead with a push broom. The numbers would be public before long, and they were bad indeed.

One way or another, he'd gotten around to telling the ASPCA to pound sand. By way of reprimand, I think PETA put some naked women in a cage in front of the mayor's house. That showed him.

For all the tut-tutting, all the public proclamations of disapproval, I could see the relief in my peers' eyes. People could handwaive away missed Amazon deliveries. But the disruptions had been shifting from luxuries to basic public services with unexpected speed. Untowed cars and unfixed gas leaks. Fires unfought. Feathered lives were no longer being exchanged for inconvenience, but for human lives. When reality superseded rhetoric, few would make that trade.

I went to bed that night quite looking forward to this quaint little episode's conclusion. It would pass to the annals of shared New York curios, along with the blackout, or that time the whole of Manhattan smelled like maple syrup.

I had gotten a little ahead of myself. The pigeons were still there. They had not watched the press conference or received any emails about the change in policy. If they had, I doubt they would have cared.

And having permission to blast through a herd of clucking, oblivious birds is very different from actually doing it. I felt this myself. I'd been bitching for weeks about the need for a change, about the inevitability of ripping the band-aid. I had not, in hindsight, fully visualized what it meant to roll a 23mm tire over the spine of some impossibly inert bird like the world's dullest pizza cutter.

In practice, I couldn't ride that way anyway. The weapon of choice was understandably, and necessarily, the automobile. The bigger the better. Pray for the Mazda Miata owner forced to crunch over thousands of pigeon bones, feeling every inch of the road as they did so.

For all the bleeding hearts like me who stopped short of mass slaughter, there was a cadre who were nonetheless prepared. They came in SUVs and pickup trucks and snowplows, and they did the dirty business of making the streets navigable once more. I suspect many of these happy slaughterers were basically psychopaths.

A great majority of people hid inside those first couple of days. They had waited this long. They could wait a little longer until the worst of the cleanup had finished, until the streets had been swept and hosed down and the only hint of what had transpired was the lingering smell.

Their great contribution was acquiescence, and that is no trifle. The course of society is often determined not by the actions of regular men, but by which crazies they allow to steer the ship.

I may not have possessed enough of a murderous mind to mow down all those birds. But I watched. I did it out of a sense of honesty. If I wasn't going to contribute, the least I could do was witness. I didn't want to just brush away the path I endorsed as some abstraction.

You know when anti-abortion activists go picketing around with pictures of fetuses? Everyone I know acts like that's some dirty trick. I don't see how. There's no lie there. The lie is in looking away. You should know what you're doing.

The same with eating meat. Virtually everyone I know eats meat, even if they hem and haw about it. Even if they wring their hands about the environment impact, or the cruelty of industrial agriculture. But they don't go vegan, do they? They intone the words, they breathlessly read some article in the Times about the moral cost of a hamburger, and they they click the link to the weekend's hot new restaurants, serving a 24 oz. dry aged bone-in ribeye that's to die for.

I can't stand it. I know what happens to those animals before I eat them. *I don't care*, because they're delicious. I guess I'd rather be a monster than a hypocrite. I'm weird like that.

And if you think that makes me an asshole, all I have to say is: you should have seen the folks that actually did the killing.

A lot of it is what you would have expected. Weird chuds from Staten Island or Bed-Stuy or Flatbush, the kinds of dudes rocking oversized trucks or subwoofers that can shatter glass. They'd been granted a once-in-a-lifetime outlet for violence, a chance to channel impulses society had tried tamping down since they were in kindergarten. I'd have almost felt happy for them if they didn't creep me out so much. It was like watching a cat make a toy of a mouse. Brutal. Troubling. But also beautiful insofar as its the expression of a creature completely in tune with its nature.

Sometimes beauty takes the form of a 40-year-old man in an F-150, pulling donuts through a sea of braindead pigeons that refuse, even in the face of absolute slaughter, to budge.

But by far, the image that sticks in my memory is a woman. She must have been in her 70s, a frail, crooked thing that by complexion and attire looked to be some Eastern European emigre. She carried as small, sharp knife, wading through the birds and shanking them one by one. She cursed as she did it. I think I saw her spit on one. She was killing them like it was revenge.

The Sanitation department followed with the clean up. It was an odd arrangement, but I expect it was for the best. The average garbageman might look surly and tough, but that doesn't make him fit for killing. Dealing with the carcasses is a lesser task, one that can be tempered with OT and hazard pay.

This was the strange, two-pronged procedure. A volunteer force of slaughterers led the advance, tailed by a professional force armed with hoses and garbage trucks. The speed of it astonished me. Three days in a row I'd venture from my apartment to make a day of it. The first day all I had to do was step outside. But the second set me on my bike again for the first time in weeks. I jaunted up to Prospect Park.

I didn't have a lot of compatriots, but I had a few, and we found ourselves coalescing as the reclamation progressed. This roving band of attendees, like Dead Heads trucking around to different concerts. We'd gather together at the edge of pigeon territory, find some enterprising bodega that was still open, and buy whatever stock remained. Dusty old cans of Asian tea and stale nuts. It was honestly kind of fun.

We seemed to have a tacit understanding. We exercised trigger discipline on our phones. The shift in public will that allowed for this great purge was a gentle one; one that might be undermined were all those hiding, homebound citizens confronted with the reality of what was taking place. Let them stick with Netflix. If they really wanted to see, all they had to do was come.

Among those who had, there was an interesting cross-section of people, the kind you don't often encounter these days in New York, where everyone is sorted and directed to the like-minded. And because the process was advancing so rapidly, we had a shared destination in sight. It was clear enough, from our own personal paths and from the crowdsourced maps we'd all consult on our phones. The efforts in Manhattan the outer boroughs would all converge at the water, a pincer attack culminating at the various bridges and tunnels. (Things were moving slower in Manhattan, presumably not for a glut of pigeons, but a dearth of volunteers.) We kept an informal countdown in our head, and it was easily to extrapolate when it would all wrap up. I left that fourth day feeling bittersweet emotions. I was excited for the end, but a bit wistful about it too.

For all that had been cleared out, traffic was still a fraction of its normal scale. There were those hiding. But also, major routes remained unnavigable. Transit between Manhattan and Brooklyn or Queens was still impossible by car; each bridge was covered in a writhing, feathered carpet. Removing the pigeons was an all-or-nothing affair, and this last, tricky corridor was the key obstacle. We wouldn't have a great view, stuck back on land, but we weren't about to abandon the cause now.

And yet, as I rolled down Flatbush Avenue, I could see something was wrong. The fleet of executioners, the trucks and vans and other vehicles, they all hung back. So too did the spectators, out of deference more than anything. We had visited these champions—these vicious pigeon-killers who had channeled their possible psychopathy into a tool for the greater good—for days on end. Who among us dared to cut ahead?

At first, no one. But as the delay extended from minutes to hours, our respect for hierarchy began to wither. Eventually, one of us summoned up the bravery to ask a driver in an idling truck near the back of the queue. He was no wiser, however. Everything had coalesced with such a natural structure that we had just assumed there was coordination among the executioners. They must be receiving orders, taking commands over walkie-talkies to clear out this or that block.

"Nah," he explained. "I just show up each morning and start running over pigeons."

That the participants should be just as clueless as the spectators caused a small uproar. We were still bunched up by Barclay's Center, a good 20 minute walk from the proper entrance of the bridge, and since I had my bike, I volunteered to scout ahead. I pedaled down Flatbush Avenue, filtering between the seemingly endless line of vehicles, all standing by with remarkable discipline.

My view was limited, but as I neared Tillary, I could make out the unbelievable colored strobe of police lights in the distance. I knew in a moment something was wrong. The police—all the city authorities, in fact—had made a point of remaining out of sight for the whole ghastly affair. Only Sanitation braved the scene, and only afterward. There had been no news, either. No cameras, which was bizarre. There was a tacit understanding, I think, among those who showed up. We had chosen to witness something most people couldn't stomach. They didn't want to see it, and if they had seen it, they might have started backing out on the whole terrible, necessary project. The price of admittance was silence.

A couple of animal rights types had tried showing up. Their cameras had been smashed after only a few minutes. I wasn't part of that, mind you, but later on I heard people bragging.

Now, there were cops ahead. And not just a few. A whole blockade of black and whites. Had a person died, I wondered? I considered the circumstances. It had been a multi-day festival of slaughter, with uncoordinated volunteers running rampant with weapons and cars. We were probably overdue for someone to get killed.

What I saw as I rode past the last of the idling cars was so much worse.

It was people. Protesters. You know the kind. Young, scrawny, strident protesters, who had secured themselves to the bridge via a variety of means. Some had formed a human chain, joined together wrist to wrist by lengths of PVC pipe. Some seemed to have glued themselves to the asphalt. And there were runners, tending to the human shields, pulling supplies and nourishment from coolers and other stashes.

Behind them, on the bridge itself, was a sea of pigeons. The protesters formed a massive, inert wall; a human dike.

Except, I have my metaphor backwards. The pigeons were not the sea. We were. And they were structured to hold us back.

The police stood between us. They had thrown up a couple roadblocks, and they milled about without much enthusiasm. I got the feeling they were as disappointed as the rest of us.

"Hey," I called out. "What's going on?"

The cop threw his arms up. "Protesters, looks like."

"Yeah, I can see that. I mean why aren't you pulling them out of here?"

"Mayor's orders. Doesn't want to deal with the optics, I'd bet."

"What optics?"

The cop pointed a finger over my shoulder, and I turned to see a van with a big telescoping satellite dish mounted on top. Another look, and I realized what I had missed: a roving camera and correspondent in among the blockade of bodies.

"It's just one," I said.

"One is all it takes," he said. "The protesters all have cell phones anyway."

"You're going to have to pull them out eventually. Why waste the time?"

"Well that's what I told the mayor when he personally called me up. Don't know why he didn't listen."

I sighed. "It's still a waste of time."

The cop shrugged. "People aren't pigeons."

I felt deflated. It had been so close to finished. Life had been so close to starting again. And it had to be right at the bridge, that critical choke point between the boroughs. Then, a terrible thought occurred to me. The cop was losing patience, but I troubled him for one last question.

"The other bridges and tunnels?" I asked.

He gave a bored little nod. "Hope you didn't have Broadway tickets or nothing."

I peaked over the bridge. The assholes where even blocking the subway tracks, where the birds had parked themselves in two thin parallel lines along each rail.

I wanted to stick around and see how things played out, but it was stasis. The cops were doing basic crowd control. They had neither the numbers nor the energy to begin clearing them out. And my fellow travellers still waited at the back of the line, eager for news.

By the time I made it back, the phone moratorium had been broken. Everyone had seen what I'd seen, beamed up by satellite, bounced back to earth, broadcast, recorded, uploaded, tweeted, retweeted and then, finally, whispered through the crowd in hushed tones.

"What do we do now?" one young woman asked.

And of course there was only one answer, but none of us wanted to say it, so we spent another ninety minutes loitering around before, one person at a time, the party fizzled out and we all went home.

---

I spent the next couple of days seething. There was nothing else to do while I was stuck at home watching nothing happen. The cops sat around with their thumbs up their asses. The protesters did their stupid fucking chants. Every once in a while they'd stick a microphone in front of one, and they'd go off for a few minutes about how opening the city back up was racist or sexist or colonialist or some other retarded bullshit.

It was like no one wanted to live. These indecisive, phone addicted pussies, content to live out the rest of their lives backseat driving from behind a screen. The actual protesters, at least had the will to actively get in the way. Don't get me wrong. I fucking hated them. I thought of that old lady, shanking pigeons one by one.

But hate and respect are on different axes, I guess. I'd take anger over the endless, static passivity of the undecided.

Other people didn't get it, not at first. The birds had been flushed out of their own neighborhoods. There was a warm spell, and some doe-eyed, naive fools flooded back into the streets ready to resume their lives of brunches and shows and street fairs. They thought the worst was over, and this little cluster of protesters was a side show. Perhaps, even, a merited concession to the preceding brutality of the previous few days. Why did all the pigeons have to die, after all?

These people, suffice it to say, had never really thought about the fact that they were on an island.

This was not true of the Bronx. It was not true, even, of Staten Island, because you could be damn sure there were no peaceniks on the Goethals holding up traffic. And ironically, it was not true of Manhattan. The Lincoln and Holland tunnels had been cleared out early, and there were no birds for the protesters to protect there.

Brooklyn and Queens were severed, though, which was easy to forget with the whole of Long Island behind us. We did not get our food and our iPhones and our clothes and all the rest of our endless modern amenities from Montauk.

And so when the brunches and street fairs were closed due to shortages, they might have felt the first pangs of something unsettling. When they entered a grocery store for the first time after a week of relying on deliveries and apps, and they saw the extents to which the shelves had been stripped, perhaps they felt greater reservations. Perhaps things felt a bit too reminiscent of disaster footage and zombie films.

But then, denial is a hell of a thing. And fear-mongering is unfashionable. The kind of thing *conservatives* do, worrying about crime and starvation and the breakdown of society, and other such frivolities. Living without the organic avocados is the least we can do, for the birds.

Sacrificing a brunch for the sake of animal life struck many as a worthwhile sacrifice. Never mind how many of those brunches had been omelets or Eggs Benedict. Trading the organic bread for the regular was tolerable. Trading down once more to Wonder Bread, this was more suspect.

New York City is not a real place. It cannot survive on its own. With major arteries all blocked, it was being choked to death. Many people realized this, but not, it seemed, the ones with any sway.

The protesters, it was announced, would be allowed to remain, not because they had any right to disrupt the city's function on such a level, but because, thanks to their almost suicidal commitment, they could not be removed without the risk of someone being injured or killed.

Where was I during all this? I'm ashamed to admit that I was hiding. I had slipped into something close to depression after the dashed, false hope of that grand pigeon slaughter. But I also seethed. I paced around my apartment, stocked as full as I could manage with canned goods and supplements, watching the interminable video streams from the bridges and tunnels. The righteousness of these people, the piousness. They were so convinced of their heroism, using themselves as human shields. They were still hostage takers, as far as I was concerned. As the days wore on and I felt more and more that they had made the city into a prison itself, I began to fantasize about them coming to harm. I wanted it. I wanted them to become the victims they so loudly professed to be.

But I didn't do anything about it. For all my bluster, I didn't ride back and start swinging a bike lock into their dumb fucking faces. I didn't have access to violence as a tool. I was just as domesticated, whether by birth or by training, as all my progressive hipster friends, and it made me ashamed.

It was another week of this before the threat of starvation in Brooklyn became too visible to deny. It had always been the obvious result. Why did people always have to wait until the inevitable actually happened in order to believe it?

With the will in place, the rest would be easy. I'd seen it all before. In Zucotti Park. From a distance, at CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle. The fuckery would continue for as long as it was allowed. And then, in the face of even the slightest authority, all of the drumming and chanting and retarded slogans would melt away like so much Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I hooked my laptop up to the TV so I could watch the proceedings like the Super Bowl. I unwrapped a whole new block of cheese and a whole new sleeve of crackers, rations be damned. The grocery shelves would be full again soon enough.

The cops were in full riot gear mode, dark helmets and shields and batons, clomping along in unison. I may not be ACAB, but I've never been a big fan of the police. It was a strange and disturbing thing to see them, jackbooted and fascistic, deeply associated in my brain with all that's wrong with society, and to feel a thrill. I was, it seemed, on team thug.

The footage was from an illicit stream. Somewhere out there, a small team had assembled a setup that put the broadcast networks to shame. They had the news feeds, mostly for the helicopter shots. But they had, as well, the streams from Twitch and Facebook and YouTube of innumerable people on the ground, including the protesters themselves. All those feeds weren't perfectly in sync, but they were close enough to cut between, and to do so with an astonishing cinematic flair. It really was like watching a movie. You could feel the slow building anticipation of these two forces meeting.

In all honestly, I appreciated anything they could do to hype up the occasion. These crowd-clearing operations were not telegenic, for the most part. Riots were telegenic. But a protest getting cleared is a little bit of a sad thing. The protesters' resistance consists of inertia, and little else. It can be a bit like watching heavily armed farmers load up sacks of potatoes.

I was still enthused. I had grown to hate these sad sacks.

The protesters had braced themselves, made themselves into human barnacles via their various formations. They would remain as annoying as possible, to the very end.

The feed cut to another aerial shot, anonymizing the protesters, turning them into a big undifferentiated mess. They might as well have been the pigeons themselves.

Except that one started to stick out. While others had signs and chains and other such tools of passive resistance, this one wielded a different object. Small. Black. Instantly recognizable.

The unseen director must have noticed just after I did, because the shot cut to a different camera still finding focus on the man. He was no warrior. He was thin, lean, and bespectacled. I saw him holding his gun, and I'll tell you the truth. I laughed.

What did this joker expect to do? Intimidate them? The NYPD is an army. They'd nail him before he could even take aim. He'd just signed his own death warrant.

But before I could even finish laughing, he raised the weapon to his temple and fired. There it was, right on camera, and probably a hundred others besides. The cops stopped dead in their tracks.

Then another protestor, some college-age women with more beauty than sense, stepped over, picked up the gun, and stood, just as her dead comrade had moments before.

And the cops, god damn them, fell back.

I kicked my TV and cracked the screen. All the subsequent dramas, over the next few weeks, I had to watch hunched over my laptop.

The new stasis established itself. It looked like World War I. The two lines entrenched. The protesters were the bulwark protecting the pigeons from the world. The police, in an infuriating switch-up, had lined up to protect the protesters from themselves.

There was no other debate to be had. Life had shut down in the face of these human roadblocks, and every other outlet for activity or conversation had closed off as the borough, and the long tail of inhabitants in Long Island, slowly choked.

There is something futile about holing up in an apartment with canned goods, endlessly hitting refresh in a desperate bid for connection. It doesn't work. You exhaust every argument in an afternoon, all the pros and cons, all the hot takes, and after that it's just a cyclical, obsessive waste of time, like an OCD sufferer touching doorknobs. So I unplugged. That helped for a day or two, but before to long, the quiet isolation got to me. I started to berate myself. Why was I still here? Why did I linger, constantly convincing myself that an end was right around the corner? Why didn't I grab a knife and start hacking my way to Jersey like one of the psychopaths I'd so happily cheered on?

Now and again I'd think about going outside, but a gunshot or a siren would put me back in my place. These weren't unknown sounds. I'd spent decades in neighborhoods where a gunshot was unsurprising, where in the summers you might hear something one night out of every three. I knew them well enough to learn the difference from a backfiring car or a firecracker. And I'd always waved those away as the price of bohemianism or gentrification or whatever the hell I was up to.

But as it ramped up to a nightly occurrence, then a daily one, and then before too long, four or five times a day, the implication grew undeniable. People weren't just getting angry and beefing with each other. They were getting desperate, the violence no longer a tragedy of the human condition, but a mere fact of nature, like a hawk plucking a smaller bird from the sky. A man's gotta eat.

The shootings were just one more factor in my growing cabin fever, already stoked by the steady stream of internet bitching I was piping into my apartment to fill the hours. A digital collage of social degeneration, of empty storefronts and violent assaults and ostensibly starving children. At his frequent press conferences, you could see the tortured ambivalence contorting the mayor's face. Immediately surrounding him, he faced the demands of the donor class: well-fed vegans who had written off the endless horrors from Brooklyn as disinformation and far-right conspiracism. Because, of course, that's Brooklyn for you. Trump country.

But surely, he sensed the temperature on the other side of the bridge, where his constituency teetered toward outright revolt. He too knew there was only one end to this.

Eventually, I had to leave. I donned a long jacket to hide my frame, lest anyone wonder where I'd been eating, and I pumped up the tires on my disused bike. I hoped speed would protect me, but in truth, there was little I could do if someone decided to fuck with me. So be it. If I didn't leave apartment, I was going to lose my mind.

I exited into a brisk fall afternoon, the sun bright but low in the sky, hesitant and non-committal. The streets were dead. Anyone with any sense was hiding out. Which meant anyone I did run into, I should distrust. I saw a rat skitter from an uncollected pile of trash, and it occurred to me: there were no pigeons. None at all. They had not returned to the reclaimed areas; not in force, not even at normal levels.

Good riddance.

I started pedaling. I didn't know where to go, but I knew I didn't want to be still. Without consciously deciding, I started to retrace the path that I had followed all those weeks ago, watching the cleanup in action. First westward along Eastern Parkway—what used to be a routine stretch. When I reached Prospect Park, it looked beautiful, but it felt like a dark forest. The perfect place from someone to lay an ambush. I didn't dare enter. I just looped around, peaking over my shoulder at Grand Army before heading toward Flatbush.

I was going to the bridge. God only knew why. There was nothing to find there but disappointment, the same sad, still scene I'd been staring at on my laptop for weeks. But where else was there to go?

With no traffic, you could see insanely far, and in the distance I could tell something had changed. It gained resolution as I neared, and by a half mile away I could make out the broad strokes of the scene. The birds, the protesters, the cops—but then, closest to me, a new huge crowd had appeared.

I hadn't seen nor heard anything about the new group. It was as though whatever final straw that had pushed me out the door had similarly afflicted thousands of others, some force just as diffuse and mysterious as the one that had driven the pigeons in the first place; a beacon in the collective unconscious.

As I arrived at the edge of the crowd, I could better observe its character. It was no counter-protest. It was a mob, shouting and spitting, eyes wide with rage. My mind turned back—not for the first time—to that old woman, cursing the birds as she shivved them.

It was hard to see past the throng, but not impossible. The police remained on the other side. Their numbers had dwindled. It was an anemic presence. And what few cops remained appeared enfeebled. Their riot gear attempted to project authority, but their body language spoke in a different voice, and that voice said, "Oh, fuck."

They held up their riot shields and clubs. A few had rifles, which they pointed as a deterrent. They were unconvincing.

One could feel the crowd gathering up its anger, readying to make a move. And just as it seemed things would boil over, there was a great, shrill tone from everywhere at once. It was an emergency alert, and everyone reflexively checked their phones to find, not a message, but an URL. I peered over someone's shoulder as he followed it to the destination: a live stream. The setting was familiar at this point, the mayor at his podium, midway through another pronouncement. Though this time, he seemed to speak without reserve.

"...For weeks now, our city has been held hostage. The right to protest is one we hold sacrosanct. But that right extends only to peaceful protest. And the threat of violence, even directed toward oneself, is still a threat of violence: one that our government cannot condone or facilitate. As of this moment, I'm directing the police to withdraw from all sites of protest in the city, including all bridges and tunnels leading between boroughs. To those who are blocking the free flow of traffic within the city, I say this: you have exceeded your welcome. Leave. If you insist on hurting yourselves, we will no longer stop you."

Had I not been in the thick of the crowd, preoccupied by the events around me, I would have lost it. The audacity of his message, after all the hedging and triangulation, all the lip service paid to the concerns of protesters and the callous disregard of those who had opposed them! But it would have been pointless—like getting mad at one of the pigeons. He was a politician. The winds had changed, and so had he.

The police began their withdrawal, and with the mob's cooperation, it seemed to take no time at all. What was left was an empty chasm at the base of the bridge; the protesters, now unprotected, at one side. The angry crowd at the other.

The crowd moved forward.

I hung back, let everyone filter past me, and then, before the two groups met, I hopped on my saddle and pedaled away. I knew what was about to happen. If I were honest, I would have stayed to witness the real cost of the reopening, just as I had for the birds. There are limits, it seems, to what even I can stomach.

I would come back later, after the real work had been done, after the city had sent its crews to clean up; after the feathers and bodies had been bagged up, and the bird shit and blood had been washed away. I just couldn't watch it go down. But I'd be glad for it.